Favorite Physicist Contest
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Submit an entry naming your 'favorite' physicist and explaining why they have been elevated to top dog in your eyes.

Entries are limited to one paragraph (we have to read them all, so longer is NOT better!), and must be posted by 5pm on Friday, April 2nd.

Three top entries will be chosen based on creativity and persuasiveness. Winners will receive a lavish no-expenses paid trip to whatever town they are already in. We might send you something worthwhile in the mail, too.

Today, for me, it's a tie between Galileo and David Mermin, both elevated to this enviable status by their ability to write copnvincingly about their ground-breaking scientific results, while simultaneously flouting the expected strictures of the genre. Galileo, who purportedly described wine as "light held together by moisture" and who skewered his opponents so cleanly they sometimes didn't even notice, and Mermin, who introduced "Boojums" to the staid physics research literature---we could use a few more like these in this business...

For me, it was Marie Curie. In elementary school I read her biography and I guess that was the first time that I realized a woman could be a scientist, even a physicist. Learning about her pioneering work seemed so exciting. Later I was fortunate enough to have a woman, Janice VanCleave (now an author of popular books) as my high school physics teacher. How about the other women...did a female or male physicist influence you more?

Isaac Newton just kicks ass, he invented the calculus, which is now a fundamental aspect of advanced physics and his famous book Principia is just astounding... not to mention his universally famous laws, especially of universal gravitation...

Albert Einstein, he fused philosophy and science very well, he also used science as a means to know more about God, rather than the other way around. Great person.

I would have to say that for me it's a tie between these two. I like Galileo because he was willing to stand by his scientific results even in the face of severe sanctions by the Catholic Church. Einstein is one of my favorites for two reasons: first, he was a brilliant theorist, with work in a variety of areas. Second, his work as an ethicist and humanist is also compelling (see the article "Albert Einstein on Science and Ethics (With Other Voices)" in the most recent issue of "Radiations".

Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value -- Albert Einstein

It's very relative to evaluate people you don't know in person, so however Einstein was realy unique physics, I think, Feynman bewitched me for his life syle too. I like him for his thoughts, that physics isn't nothing special, but that physics are all things around us, anywhere you are looking. And among other tings, I like his phylosophy, sence for humor, contrivance ...

I believe that Murray Gell-Mann is perhaps one of the greatest contemporary physics geniuses. His development of the first quark model and the "eight-fold way" are now a basis of understanding the composite structure of mesons and baryons of all types. Current understanding of hadron multiplets now includes five dimensions (n-1 dimensions for n quark flavors), an extension from the days when Gell-Mann proposed the first three flavors of quarks (and the early two-dimensional multiplets). In our time, quarks are a fundamental concept in particle spectroscopy. Studying to be a meson spectroscopist myself, I hold Gell-Mann's work in highest esteem.

Richard Feynman was one of the most brilliant physicists of the 20th century, most famour for his Nobel Prize winning work on Quantum Electrodynamics, which has yielded some of the best and most precise agreements between theory and experiment in modern physics. I admire Feynman for his disregard of authority, his creativity and confidence and ofcourse for the excellent physics he produced. He was outspoken, frank and very intolerant of stupidity. I am an undergrad physics major and I have always wanted to be like Feynman, the greatest physicist accoding to me.

When Feynman was a kid, he started to write a book in his school notebook called, "Calculus for the Common Man." He never forgot that he and his collegues and his students were all examples of the Common Man. He lived his life fully to show that the Common Man could accomplish great things. He is my unquestioned favorite.

For his intellectual integrity, incomparable insight, sense of humor, and sheer brilliance, he is one of the greatest people, and certainly my favorite physicist. He had his flaws, both as a physicist and as a person, but his humility and devotion to his work win me over.

I was able to figure out the relationship between energy and frequency of radiation. How did I do that? Well, maybe it sounds strange, but perhaps the energy takes on discrete values. Integral multiple of say, oh I don't know, hf. What's h? You mean it's never come up before? Oh, well then I guess it's my constant then... Planck's constant that is. That's right, I ushered in a new century (my "big" paper was published in 1900) and a new era in physics. Einstein and Bohr kinda needed that relationship for some of their work. And that little constant is used in a few of the more important equations in physics. I am Max Planck, and I am the greatest physicist ever because I came up with h.

If being the father of statistical mechanics is not enough, Boltzmann is largely responsible for the atomistic view of matter that we have today (and was met with many obstacles for this view). Einstein basically built most of his knowledge of the universe upon the ideas of Boltzmann-and Feynman in turn did too. Highly underated and misunderstood, Boltzmann also suffered from clinical depression that shortened his life with a short rope. His transort theory is still heavily in use today, and is still unsolved in general form. Boltzmann died never knowing if his theories were true. A sad story, but he definitely lives on through his work, and everytime I write "k" in my calculations, I think about the pain that lead to that constant.Plus I'm sick of talking about Einstein, Feynman and Newton. We need a few new heroes.